Tarantino's lost the plot and needs a good editor

Keith Austin24 Jan 2013, 3 a.m.

OK, let's get this over and done with. I'm going to talk about Django Unchained, the new Quentin Tarantino movie out in cinemas on Thursday and I'm going to use the 'N' word. Oh yes I am, and you can't stop me. Nonsensical.

Tarantino's lost the plot and needs a good editor

OK, let's get this over and done with. I'm going to talk about Django Unchained, the new Quentin Tarantino movie out in cinemas on Thursday and I'm going to use the 'N' word. Oh yes I am, and you can't stop me. Nonsensical.

There, I've said it. Read it and weep, fan-boys; this is a film with more holes in it than a crocheted bikini. Does Tarantino not have anyone around him who can say, without fear or favour: ''I'm sorry Quent, but that's a load of rubbish?''

Perhaps the absence of Tarantino at this week's red carpet premiere in Sydney was a blessing in disguise. Because someone, surely, would have had to have asked him, in the post-show Q&A, ''when was the last time you heard the word 'no'?''

Overlong, overcooked and underdone (not an easy thing to do), this is not up there with Tarantino's best. That it's being considered for a best film Oscar beggars belief. Even Jackie Brown made more sense than this unoriginal mishmash of cliches and non-sequiturs.

It's probably too late. Someone should have stepped in on the set of Inglourious Basterds and told him that the ridiculous denouement in the theatre belonged to another, not very good, film.

But perhaps there comes a point in every auteur's success story when those voices are either silenced, or silence themselves. It's why rock bands can get away with demanding only green Smarties in their dressing rooms.

As any journalist/writer worth their salt knows, everyone benefits from a good editor. But try telling that to Neil Gaiman, whose wonderfully inventive 2001 book American Gods was re-issued as a 10th anniversary special with 12,000 extra words. The original paperback came in at a massive 501 large format pages.

The 12,000 extra words are called ''the author's preferred text'', also known as all the stuff the editors wouldn't let the author put in the first time around.

Stephen King, too, has gone down the reissue road with his book The Stand. His ''director's cut'' turned an 800-pager into 1100 pages. Again, to no great advantage.

Of course, King's publishers could print the man's shopping list and it would sell its socks off so why even bother editing anything he does?

Well, perhaps to prevent the debacles of his last two books, Under The Dome and 11/22/63, his J.F.K. assassination time travel romp. In both of them, King gradually paints himself into a plot-line corner and has to resort to utterly unlikely and unsatisfactory endings.

These otherwise excellent books could have done with a brave, experienced editor writing ''B -, could do better'' in the margin.

That same editor could have been redeployed to work on A Dance With Dragons, the latest 1000-page instalment in George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones franchise. A great, sprawling breezeblock of a thing that would choke a sperm whale, it cried out for a firm hand from someone who could perhaps have said: ''George, seeing as it's called A Dance With Dragons - maybe fewer feasts and a tad more dragon?''

As it is, even rusted-on Game of Thrones readers have come away disappointed. As one online review site, The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, put it: ''For a thousand or so pages almost nothing happens and then we get a bunch of cliffhangers. The End.''

Are these hugely successful creative writers victims of their own success? Can they just disregard editors, or have editors become mere pipelines to the public? As the League of Ordinary Gentleman site added: ''I just can't imagine reading a manuscript of this book and thinking 'This is good. This is ready for publication.'''

Tarantino is reported to have said he would like to release a director's cut of his spaghetti western that is five hours long. Good, then we might find out some more about Django's wife Broomhilda, who seems to have been dropped into the plot from a circling spaceship (maybe King helped out there); and maybe it will solve the mystery of Zoe Bell and her bizarre eyeballs-only appearance. It certainly had better explain the stupid dancing horse, that's for sure.

All of which should have been picked up and corrected before we crammed into the State Theatre to watch Tarantino strained through Tarantino.

*This story has been brought to you by me, followed by my partner, the opinion page editor, a subeditor and, with any luck, a final proofread. And it's all the better for it; the first draft read like a Tarantino movie.